In the last few weeks, we have been inundated with damaging reports about the plight of Indian students in Australia. Wanton attacks on young Indians in different Australian cities seem to take place frequently and a picture has been built up of a young community under stress. As it is, Indians are notoriously soft targets for the thugs and hooligans of Western societies, as seen in a string of violent incidents over the decades in places where Indian immigrants are established in good numbers, notably the UK and USA. By and large, immigrants from India are a quiet, non-aggressive community, industrious and inclined to keep to themselves. The incidents in Australia are in some respects similar to what has been seen elsewhere, but what has made them particularly notorious is the implication that they have been racially motivated. This, of course, is a very delicate territory. Attacks by young hoodlums out to grab money from their victims are problems of one sort, attacks motivated by racial hatred are something rather different. The hubbub in India shows how sensitive the matter is and how rapidly it can blow up into a real impediment to normal relations.
The Indian media have been very active in pursuing the story and in highlighting its most adverse aspects. Indian politicians have felt obliged to say rather strong things that reflect these preoccupations, and normal exchanges between the two countries have been slowed down. What seems to have been particularly galling to India’s opinion is the rather unfazed Australian response. That country’s authorities have not failed to react or to recognise the need to bring matters under control but they have been deliberately low-key in what they have said about the situation. This, in the heightened mood in India, has been regarded as insufficient and has drawn criticism. Nor has it been ignored that Australia has quite a few skeletons in its cupboard on the issue of race, like its ‘White Australia’ policy of earlier years and its readiness to maintain close links with apartheid South Africa at a time when the world, with India in the van, was doing all it could to bring an end to that abhorrent system. Such attitudes have long been discarded Down Under yet it could be that lurking memories from the past have made Indian reactions that much more critical. There is even a PIL that has induced the Supreme Court to seek an explanation from the government about the steps it is taking and what further it proposes to do. This concatenation of events has produced the conviction that there is something rotten Down Under and we must take a hand in trying to improve matters. (Courtesy The Nation)
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